Arthur Andersen Consulting Partners

The consulting partners of Arthur Andersen built the firm's systems and management consulting practice from the 1950s onward, starting with the 1953 General Electric payroll computer study. By the late 1980s consulting was large enough to be split into its own unit, Andersen Consulting.

Accenture has no single founder. It began in the early 1950s as the business and technology consulting practice of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm founded in 1913. In 1953 an Arthur Andersen team led by Joseph Glickauf studied payroll automation for General Electric at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, which led GE to install a UNIVAC I computer in 1954. In 1989 the consulting practice became Andersen Consulting, a separate unit of Andersen Worldwide, with the more profitable unit paying the other up to 15% of its profits. Andersen Consulting filed for ICC arbitration in 1997 after Arthur Andersen built a competing consulting line. The ruling announced on August 7, 2000 let it leave, rejected Arthur Andersen's $14.5B claim, and required it to change its name and pay fees withheld during the dispute (The Guardian reported $850M; later accounts cite about $1.2B). The firm became Accenture on January 1, 2001 and went public on the NYSE on July 19, 2001, the year before Arthur Andersen was convicted over its Enron audit work. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).